On blogging & the presence of an audience
I received an adorable* email a day or three ago, telling me that the obvious answer to seagulls is to import a few griffins. :: falls down laughing :: OF COURSE. WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT.**
Thank you, all of you who have written to say they’re glad to see this blog again.*** One of the questions that keeps coming up is whether there will be a forum again too. Well . . . probably not, unless something dramatic happens, like I win the National Book Award† & start getting 1,000,000 hits a day††, in which case I will hire someone to mind the forum. I had volunteer minders on the old blog, for whom I was, & retrospectively still am, very grateful, but my conscience was never quite clean about it, & I wouldn’t do it again.†††
There is also the dreadful possibility that the time has passed for random blogs like this one. Perish forfend & all that, but the internet is beyond comprehension-ly‡ ginormous, & there’s way too much to choose from when you have 5 minutes or 5 hours to spare‡‡, even for someone like me who doesn’t know what she’s doing as soon as she turns on her computer, let alone takes a deep breath & clicks . . . on line. ‡‡‡ &, you know, social media is The Enemy. ɸ I dropped out of Facebook & Twitter, when it was still Twitter, except for the pinned notes under my name to say I’m not there any more but see, here’s a link to a blog that may be live again, & a web site that needs attention. I only even know what, for example, TikTok is, because more au courant friends occasionally send me links ɸɸ, & the rest of social media, eh. So when I say I’m clueless I REALLY MEAN IT.
But . . . I was reading some potted biography of some previous-era author recently, about answering street mail. I remember street mail . . . & I was never very good at answering it. ɸɸɸ Some things don’t change, even when the medium does. & as I have said many times, including in the old blog, I don’t feel an author owes anything to her readers but her books. But I do understand the wish to see an author as a human being. This blog is what I can do about that. Ω
So I hope I’ll keep doing it. & that enough of you will keep reading it.
* * *
* I told you-a soppy cranky old woman
** & me a frenzied Diana Wynne Jones fan.^
^ I still miss her. Sigh.
*** I’ve had a few people tell me that I rant very well. Oh good.
† Yes, I know. I need to get a new book out. We’re working on it
†† Although I’m not sure the NBA actually results in sales??? Maybe it’s just me viewing Serious Literary Awards with deep suspicion. I was (almost) dismayed to read the shortlist for the Booker this year & discover I’ve read one of the books. Oops. How did that happen?^
^ Eh. Well, I know how it happened. It was recommended to me by a boffiny brainbox friend, & every now & again I feel I want to prove I’m not entirely incapable of reading something containing deep sagacious insight into the human condition. I know some long words! I can (probably) follow a plot that is slightly more complicated than (a) Find the Bad Guy(s)!# (b) Dispatch same! (c) Celebrate!
I realise this is a character flaw, but I have limited tolerance for Profound Thought, particularly Anguished Profound Thought. I’d much rather reread Tolkien than spend chapters of heavily-adjectived time with moony twits. I’d even rather read a cereal box, if I ate cereal any more. Bags of buckwheat flour don’t have a lot of text.
# ‘Guys’ is, you realise, a generic term, covering men, women & everything in between or proceeding therefrom in an expansive-& genderly confusing way to someone my age. Remember I grew up when even being gay was a threat to world order. Some things do manage to change for the better if enough people yell & scream & demand their concerns be recognised. Hold that thought.
††† The friend who in her day job is a librarian & whom I shamelessly exploit^ should read this & do her own falling down laughing, but she’s too nice.^^
^ She keeps insisting that she lives to look stuff up, & having more things to look up makes her happy
^^ Or addicted. I wonder if there’s a detox programme for people who are so busy getting high on looking stuff up they forget to do ordinary upkeep tasks like eating & going to bed.
‡ My comprehension, anyway. I don’t do tech like, in fact very like, I don’t do time. I blistering-doodah swim in time & tech, but it’s like bleeding in shark-infested waters. UH OH. THERE’S A BIG ONE. WHERE’S SOME SEAWEED TO HIDE IN. I have a million clocks^ but every time I look at one I can feel my brain groping reluctantly for its Translator Function. Time is not my native language. When I was little, & first learning to tell time, I used to say things like ‘it’s five minutes past half past’ or ‘it’s five minutes before quarter past.’ The local grown-ups had a problem with this for some reason. I still feel pretty much like that. But when I was a kid all you had to contend with was a clockface with the numbers 1-12^^ neatly spaced around it.^^^ Now you have, you know, digital, & 24 hour clocks which expect you to know that 1500 is actually 3 in the afternoon, & 19:30 might be suppertime if you were the sort of person who went to bed before midnight, but since you aren’t, you don’t care. You’ll eat when you get around to it. Or when the dog tells you he hasn’t eaten in at least 48 hours. There’s always a horrible vertiginous moment when he starts trying to put this over because . . . maybe he’s telling the truth.
^ & at least a few of them work. The ones that work are the most likely to be obscured by giant looming houseplants. Or piles of books, of course. Everything in this house, including Genghis & me, is at risk of being obscured by piles of books. Although the giantest of the looming houseplants are increasingly making their presence . . . inexorable. The Swiss cheese plant+ has taken over the landing with such energy & relish that it’s getting hard to make it round her corner & up the rest of the stairs.
You know the proper name of the Swiss cheese plant is Monstera deliciosa? Isn’t that great? Don’t you now have to have one?
+ her name is Maude#
# yes, really
^^ I can cope with Roman numerals. Up to twelve. Don’t make me read copyright dates in Roman numerals.
^^^ Although as a Navy brat I did have to endure the ship’s bell system that starts over every flipping four hours, because that’s how long a watch lasts. You’re supposed to know which four-hour period you’re in when some noisy officious bell tells you you’re half an hour or three & a half hours through that watch?!? IN WHAT UNIVERSE?+ & some psycho came up with the great idea to make clocks for home use that ring watch bells.
+ A wet one, with lots of oceans
‡‡ WHO EVER HAS 5 HOURS TO SPARE
‡‡‡ AAAAAAAUGH^
^ If this heartfelt exclamation is not large-font & in colour, Blogdad’s latest patient, one-syllable-words tutorial in How to Make the Blog Work, Yes, Robin, Even for You, has been unsuccessful. Although one-syllable words can be quite expressive. Mid-tutorial he was heard to exclaim, WHAT? WHY HAVE THEY DONE IT THAT WAY??
ɸ Says the woman who is very tired of yelling HEY at idiots so fixed on their tiny handheld screens that in another step they’re going to smack into a certain cranky old woman & her large whirly-pawed dog. If it weren’t that he might get hurt, I’d be tempted to let them trip over him & get tangled up in those feet. But, NOTE, the real world is still out here. It’s not all virtual. Those paws are definitely real.
However, Sauron on a two-stroke [motorcycle]^ is an image that works for me perhaps too well. I think the huge dark immaterial all-seeing eye is quite a good metaphor for bathed in broadband first-world life. That leaves the two-stroke bike to be a palantir. Yeah. I think I like that too.
^ See previous post.
ɸɸ whereupon TikTok has a meltdown because its tentacles or algorithms or whatever they are unmask me as not a member & sometimes it has such a mega tantrum about this shortcoming it won’t let me see whatever the link was to anyway. However, I know that ‘TikTok made me buy it!’ means this isn’t a book I want to read, so actually it does serve a useful purpose in my life & maybe I do owe it something.^
^ No.
ɸɸɸ Better than I am at answering emails. But not a lot.
Ω Not guaranteed I admit. But I’m likelier to be able to write a blog post occasionally than I am to perform any of the other, Yo! Yes I am a (cranky) human being!, options out there.
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